On 05/27/2015 12:30 PM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
On 26/05/2015 23:25, Christopher Covington wrote:
On 05/25/2015 08:53 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
On 22/05/2015 13:12, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
In
particular I don't see why we need to have a SATA controller and ISA/LPC
bridge in every virt machine - root PCI bus only should be possible, as you
can provide disks via virtio-blk or virtio-scsi and serial, parallel, mouse,
floppy via PCI devices and/or by adding a USB bus in the cases where you
really need one.
I think removing the ISA/LPC bridge is hard. It includes the real-time
clock and fw_cfg, for example.
Could VirtIO specified replacements make sense for these peripherals?
Not really. virtio is too heavyweight and you'd be reinventing the
wheel unnecessarily.
For example, ARM's "-M virt" uses a pl011 block for the RTC, and also
uses fw_cfg. Another commonly used ISA device is the UART, for which
again -M virt uses a pl031.
The RTC can be replaced by kvmclock, the keyboard by virtio-console.
Maybe we can provide an msr- or pci- based interface to fw_cfg.
